Specifications, Pricing and Availability

I have to admit that I am a little surprised to see such a high reported read and write speed for the Corsair Force Series of products and the SF-1200 controller. With a rated read speed of 285 and a write speed of 275 it is safe to say that your motherboards implementation of SATA 3G will be the limiting factor, just as it was with the SandForce SF-1500 enterprise/prosumer drivers we have already looked at. Could the consumer version of the controller perform just as well as the enterprise unit in a desktop environment?

Corsair is offering the Force Series in 100 and 200GB capacity sizes at the time of writings. We do know that the SF-1200 is capable of scaling all the way to 512GB (raw flash memory) from documentation found on SandForce's website so there is a chance we may even see Corsair launch a 400GB version when the market is right. If you like digging into all of the fine details of new technology, that document is a good place to start as well. Now that we have all of the facts about the new SF-1200 controller down, we will be publishing an editorial in a few days covering both the SF-1500 and SF-1200 products.

At the time of writing e-tailers have been notified of when to expect supply, but have yet to publicly announce pricing. Solidata, a supplier of industrial SSDs already has SF-1200 products showing up at obscure locations and the prices show the 100GB drive coming in at around 440 and the 200GB drive hanging around 700 USD. It has been my experience that Solidata products tend to run on the upper extreme for their categories and if that is the case this time, the 100GB Corsair Force may just show up at Newegg for 400 USD or less. That is a very encouraging number since we have already gotten accustom to seeing 128GB Barefoot controlled drives for 400 USD. Then again, at CES we were quoted numbers at the upper 400 USD range for the 100GB drive, so in reality we are really going to have to just wait and see what they launch at. Maybe Crucial's RealSSD C300 changed the SandForce pricing structure a bit and moved them into the lower 400s instead of the upper 400's. We will know for sure in a few days.